1.
What is Transhumanism?

Transhumanism
is a loosely defined movement that has developed gradually over the past two decades.[1]
It promotes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding and evaluating the
opportunities for enhancing the human condition and the human organism opened
up by the advancement of technology. Attention is given to both present technologies,
like genetic engineering and information technology, and anticipated future ones,
such as molecular nanotechnology and artificial intelligence.

The
enhancement options being discussed include radical extension of human health-span,
eradication of disease, elimination of unnecessary suffering, and augmentation
of human intellectual, physical, and emotional capacities. Other transhumanist
themes include space colonization and the possibility of creating superintelligent
machines, along with other potential developments that could profoundly alter
the human condition. The ambit is not limited to gadgets and medicine, but encompasses
also economic, social, institutional designs, cultural development, and psychological
skills and techniques.

Transhumanists
view human nature as a work-in-progress, a half-baked beginning that we can learn
to remold in desirable ways. Current humanity need not be the endpoint of evolution.
Transhumanists hope that by responsible use of science, technology, and other
rational means we shall eventually manage to become posthuman, beings with vastly
greater capacities than present human beings have.

Some
transhumanists take active steps to increase the probability that they personally
will survive long enough to become posthuman, for example by choosing a healthy
lifestyle or by making provisions for having themselves cryonically suspended
in case of de-animation.[2] In contrast to many
other ethical outlooks, which in practice often reflect a reactionary attitude
to new technologies, the transhumanist view is guided by an evolving vision to
take a more proactive approach to technology policy. This vision, in broad strokes,
is to create the opportunity to live much longer and healthier lives, to enhance
our memory and other intellectual faculties, to refine our emotional experiences
and increase our subjective sense of well-being, and generally to achieve a greater
degree of control over our own lives. This affirmation of human potential is offered
as an alternative to customary injunctions against playing God, messing with nature,
tampering with our human essence, or displaying punishable hubris.

Transhumanism
does not entail technological optimism. While future technological capabilities
carry immense potential for beneficial deployments, they also could be misused
to cause enormous harm, ranging all the way to the extreme possibility of intelligent
life becoming extinct. Other potential negative outcomes include widening social
inequalities or a gradual erosion of the hard-to-quantify assets that we care
deeply about but tend to neglect in our daily struggle for material gain, such
as meaningful human relationships and ecological diversity. Such risks must be
taken very seriously, as thoughtful transhumanists fully acknowledge.[3]

Transhumanism
has roots in secular humanist thinking, yet is more radical in that it promotes
not only traditional means of improving human nature, such as education and cultural
refinement, but also direct application of medicine and technology to overcome
some of our basic biological limits.

2. Human limitations

The
range of thoughts, feelings, experiences, and activities accessible to human organisms
presumably constitute only a tiny part of what is possible. There is no reason
to think that the human mode of being is any more free of limitations imposed
by our biological nature than are those of other animals. In much the same way
as Chimpanzees lack the cognitive wherewithal to understand what it is like to
be human – the ambitions we humans have, our philosophies, the complexities of
human society, or the subtleties of our relationships with one another, so we
humans may lack the capacity to form a realistic intuitive understanding of what
it would be like to be a radically enhanced human (a “posthuman”) and of the thoughts,
concerns, aspirations, and social relations that such humans may have.

Our
own current mode of being, therefore, spans but a minute subspace of what is possible
or permitted by the physical constraints of the universe (see Figure 1). It is
not farfetched to suppose that there are parts of this larger space that represent
extremely valuable ways of living, relating, feeling, and thinking.

The limitations
of the human mode of being are so pervasive and familiar that we often fail to
notice them, and to question them requires manifesting an almost childlike naiveté.
Let consider some of the more basic ones.

Lifespan.
Because of the precarious conditions in which our Pleistocene ancestors lived,
the human lifespan has evolved to be a paltry seven or eight decades. This is,
from many perspectives, a rather short period of time. Even tortoises do better
than that.

We don’t have
to use geological or cosmological comparisons to highlight the meagerness of our
allotted time budgets. To get a sense that we might be missing out on something
important by our tendency to die early, we only have to bring to mind some of
the worthwhile things that we could have done or attempted to do if we had had
more time. For gardeners, educators, scholars, artists, city planners, and those
who simply relish observing and participating in the cultural or political variety
shows of life, three scores and ten is often insufficient for seeing even one
major project through to completion, let alone for undertaking many such projects
in sequence.

Human character
development is also cut short by aging and death. Imagine what might have become
of a Beethoven or a Goethe if they had still been with us today. Maybe they would
have developed into rigid old grumps interested exclusively in conversing about
the achievements of their youth. But maybe, if they had continued to enjoy health
and youthful vitality, they would have continued to grow as men and artists, to
reach levels of maturity that we can barely imagine. We certainly cannot rule
that out based on what we know today. Therefore, there is at least a serious possibility
of there being something very precious outside the human sphere. This constitutes
a reason to pursue the means that will let us go there and find out.

Intellectual
capacity. We have all had moments when we wished we were a little smarter.
The three-pound, cheese-like thinking machine that we lug around in our skulls
can do some neat tricks, but it also has significant shortcomings. Some of these
– such as forgetting to buy milk or failing to attain native fluency in languages
you learn as an adult – are obvious and require no elaboration. These shortcomings
are inconveniences but hardly fundamental barriers to human development.

Yet
there is a more profound sense in the constraints of our intellectual apparatus
limit our modes of our mentation. I mentioned the Chimpanzee analogy earlier:
just as is the case for the great apes, our own cognitive makeup may foreclose
whole strata of understanding and mental activity. The point here is not about
any logical or metaphysical impossibility: we need not suppose that posthumans
would not be Turing computable or that they would have concepts that could not
be expressed by any finite sentences in our language, or anything of that sort.
The impossibility that I am referring to is more like the impossibility for us
current humans to visualize an 200-dimensional hypersphere or to read, with perfect
recollection and understanding, every book in the Library of Congress. These things
are impossible for us because, simply put, we lack the brainpower. In the same
way, may lack the ability to intuitively understand what being a posthuman would
be like or to grok the playing field of posthuman concerns.

Further,
our human brains may cap our ability to discover philosophical and scientific
truths. It is possible that failure of philosophical research to arrive at solid,
generally accepted answers to many of the traditional big philosophical questions
could be due to the fact that we are not smart enough to be successful in this
kind of enquiry. Our cognitive limitations may be confining us in a Platonic cave,
where the best we can do is theorize about “shadows”, that is, representations
that are sufficiently oversimplified and dumbed-down to fit inside a human brain.

Bodily
functionality. We enhance our natural immune systems by getting vaccinations,
and we can imagine further enhancements to our bodies that would protect us from
disease or help us shape our bodies according to our desires (e.g. by letting
us control our bodies’ metabolic rate). Such enhancements could improve the quality
of our lives.

A more radical
kind of upgrade might be possible if we suppose a computational view of the mind.
It may then be possible to upload a human mind to a computer, by replicating in
silico the detailed computational processes that would normally take place
in a particular human brain.[4] Being an upload would have many
potential advantages, such as the ability to make back-up copies of oneself (favorably
impacting on one’s life-expectancy) and the ability to transmit oneself as information
at the speed of light. Uploads might live either in virtual reality or directly
in physical reality by controlling a robot proxy.

Sensory
modalities, special faculties and sensibilities. The current human sensory
modalities are not the only possible ones, and they are certainly not as highly
developed as they could be. Some animals have sonar, magnetic orientation, or
sensors for electricity and vibration; many have a much keener sense of smell,
sharper eyesight, etc. The range of possible sensory modalities is not limited
to those we find in the animal kingdom. There is no fundamental block to adding
say a capacity to see infrared radiation or to perceive radio signals and perhaps
to add some kind of telepathic sense by augmenting our brains with suitably interfaced
radio transmitters.

Humans
also enjoy a variety of special faculties, such as appreciation of music and a
sense of humor, and sensibilities such as the capacity for sexual arousal in response
to erotic stimuli. Again, there is no reason to think that what we have exhausts
the range of the possible, and we can certainly imagine higher levels of sensitivity
and responsiveness.

Mood,
energy, and self-control. Despite our best efforts, we often fail to feel
as happy as we would like. Our chronic levels of subjective well-being seem to
be largely genetically determined. Life-events have little long-term impact; the
crests and troughs of fortune push us up and bring us down, but there is little
long-term effect on self-reported well-being. Lasting joy remains elusive except
for those of us who are lucky enough to have been born with a temperament that
plays in a major key.

In
addition to being at the mercy of a genetically determined setpoint for our levels
of well-being, we are limited in regard to energy, will-power, and ability to
shape our own character in accordance with our ideals. Even such “simple” goals
as losing weight or quitting smoking prove unattainable to many.

Some
subset of these kinds of problems might be necessary rather than contingent upon
our current nature. For example, we cannot both have the ability easily to break
any habit and the ability to form stable, hard-to-break habits. (In this regard,
the best one can hope for may be the ability to easily get rid of habits we didn’t
deliberately choose for ourselves in the first place, and perhaps a more versatile
habit-formation system that would let us choose with more precision when to acquire
a habit and how much effort it should cost to break it.)

3. The
core transhumanist value: exploring the posthuman realm

The
conjecture that there are greater values than we can currently fathom does not
imply that values are not defined in terms of our current dispositions. Take,
for example, a dispositional theory of value such as the one described by David
Lewis.[5] According
to Lewis’s theory, something is a value for you if and only if you would want
to want it if you were perfectly acquainted with it and you were thinking and
deliberating as clearly as possible about it. On this view, there may be values
that we do not currently want, and that we do not even currently want to want,
because we may not be perfectly acquainted with them or because we are not ideal
deliberators. Some values pertaining to certain forms of posthuman existence may
well be of this sort; they may be values for us now, and they may be so in virtue
of our current dispositions, and yet we may not be able to fully appreciate them
with our current limited deliberative capacities and our lack of the receptive
faculties required for full acquaintance with them. This point is important because
it shows that the transhumanist view that we ought to explore the realm of posthuman
values does not entail that we should forego our current values. The posthuman
values can be our current values, albeit ones that we have not yet clearly comprehended.
Transhumanism does not require us to say that we should favor posthuman beings
over human beings, but that the right way of favoring human beings is by enabling
us to realize our ideals better and that some of our ideals may well be located
outside the space of modes of being that are accessible to us with our current
biological constitution.

We
can overcome many of our biological limitations. It is possible that there are
some limitations that are impossible for us to transcend, not only because of
technological difficulties but on metaphysical grounds. Depending on what our
views are about what constitutes personal identity, it could be that certain modes
of being, while possible, are not possible for us, because any being of such a
kind would be so different from us that they could not be us. Concerns of this
kind are familiar from theological discussions of the afterlife. In Christian
theology, some souls will be allowed by God to go to heaven after their time as
corporal creatures is over. Before being admitted to heaven, the souls would undergo
a purification process in which they would lose many of their previous bodily
attributes. Skeptics may doubt that the resulting minds would be sufficiently
similar to our current minds for it to be possible for them to be the same person.
A similar predicament arises within transhumanism: if the mode of being of a posthuman
being is radically different from that of a human being, then we may doubt whether
a posthuman being could be the same person as a human being, even if the posthuman
being originated from a human being.

We
can, however, envision many enhancements that would not make it impossible for
the post-transformation someone to be the same person as the pre-transformation
person. A person could obtain quite a bit of increased life expectancy, intelligence,
health, memory, and emotional sensitivity, without ceasing to exist in the process.
A person’s intellectual life can be transformed radically by getting an education.
A person’s life expectancy can be extended substantially by being unexpectedly
cured from a lethal disease. Yet these developments are not viewed as spelling
the end of the original person. In particular, it seems that modifications that
add to a person’s capacities can be more substantial than modifications that subtract,
such as brain damage. If most of someone currently is, including her most important
memories, activities, and feelings, is preserved, then adding extra capacities
on top of that would not easily cause the person to cease to exist.

Preservation
of personal identity, especially if this notion is given a narrow construal, is
not everything. We can value other things than ourselves, or we might regard it
as satisfactory if some parts or aspects of ourselves survive and flourish, even
if that entails giving up some parts of ourselves such that we no longer count
as being the same person. Which parts of ourselves we might be willing to sacrifice
may not become clear until we are more fully acquainted with the full meaning
of the options. A careful, incremental exploration of the posthuman realm may
be indispensable for acquiring such an understanding, although we may also be
able to learn from each other’s experiences and from works of the imagination.

Additionally,
we may favor future people being posthuman rather than human, if the posthumans
would lead lives more worthwhile than the alternative humans would. Any reasons
stemming from such considerations would not depend on the assumption that we ourselves
could become posthuman beings.

Transhumanism
promotes the quest to develop further so that we can explore hitherto inaccessible
realms of value. Technological enhancement of human organisms is a means that
we ought to pursue to this end. There are limits to how much can be achieved by
low-tech means such as education, philosophical contemplation, moral self-scrutiny
and other such methods proposed by classical philosophers with perfectionist leanings,
including Plato, Aristotle, and Nietzsche, or by means of creating a fairer and
better society, as envisioned by social reformists such as Marx or Martin Luther
King. This is not to denigrate what we can do with the tools we have today. Yet
ultimately, transhumanists hope to go further.

4. Basic conditions
for realizing the transhumanist project

If
this is the grand vision, what are the more particular objectives that it translates
into when considered as a guide to policy?

What
is needed for the realization of the transhumanist dream is that technological
means necessary for venturing into the posthuman space are made available to those
who wish to use them, and that society be organized in such a manner that such
explorations can be undertaken without causing unacceptable damage to the social
fabric and without imposing unacceptable existential risks.

Existential
risk – one where an adverse outcome would either annihilate Earth-originating
intelligent life or permanently and drastically curtail its potential.[6]

Several
recent discussions have argued that the combined probability of the
existential risks is very substantial.[7] The relevance of the condition of existential
safety to the transhumanist vision is obvious: if we go extinct or permanently
destroy our potential to develop further, then the transhumanist core value will
not be realized. Global security is the most fundamental and nonnegotiable requirement
of the transhumanist project.

Technological
progress. That technological progress is generally desirable from a transhumanist
point of view is also self-evident. Many of our biological shortcomings (aging,
disease, feeble memories and intellects, a limited emotional repertoire and inadequate
capacity for sustained well-being) are difficult to overcome, and to do so will
require advanced tools. Developing these tools is a gargantuan challenge for the
collective problem-solving capacities of our species. Since technological progress
is closely linked to economic development, economic growth – or more precisely,
productivity growth – can in some cases serve as a proxy for technological progress.
(Productivity growth is, of course, only an imperfect measure of the relevant
form of technological progress, which, in turn, is an imperfect measure of overall
improvement, since it omits such factors as equity of distribution, ecological
diversity, and quality of human relationships.)

The
history of economic and technological development, and the concomitant growth
of civilization, is appropriately regarded with awe, as humanity’s most glorious
achievement. Thanks to the gradual accumulation of improvements over the past
several thousand years, large portions of humanity have been freed from illiteracy,
life-expectancies of twenty years, alarming infant-mortality rates, horrible diseases
endured without palliatives, and periodic starvation and water shortages. Technology,
in this context, is not just gadgets but includes all instrumentally useful objects
and systems that have been deliberately created. This broad definition encompasses
practices and institutions, such as double-entry accounting, scientific peer-review,
legal systems, and the applied sciences.

Wide
access. It is not enough that the posthuman realm be explored by someone.
The full realization of the core transhumanist value requires that, ideally, everybody
should have the opportunity to become posthuman. It would be sub-optimal if the
opportunity to become posthuman were restricted to a tiny elite.

There
are many reasons for supporting wide access: to reduce inequality; because it
would be a fairer arrangement; to express solidarity and respect for fellow humans;
to help gain support for the transhumanist project; to increase the chances that
you will get the opportunity to become posthuman; to increase the chances that
those you care about can become posthuman; because it might increase the range
of the posthuman realm that gets explored; and to alleviate human suffering on
as wide a scale as possible.

The
wide access requirement underlies the moral urgency of the transhumanist
vision. Wide access does not argue for holding back. On the contrary, other things
being equal, it is an argument for moving forward as quickly as possible. 150,000
human beings on our planet die every day, without having had any access to the
anticipated enhancement technologies that will make it possible to become posthuman.
The sooner this technology develops, the fewer people will have died without access.

Consider
a hypothetical case in which there is a choice between (a) allowing the current
human population to continue to exist, and (b) having it instantaneously and painlessly
killed and replaced by six billion new human beings who are very similar but non-identical
to the people that exist today. Such a replacement ought to be strongly resisted
on moral grounds, for it would entail the involuntary death of six billion people.
The fact that they would be replaced by six billion newly created similar people
does not make the substitution acceptable. Human beings are not disposable. For
analogous reasons, it is important that the opportunity be become posthuman is
made available to as many humans as possible, rather than having the existing
population merely supplemented (or worse, replaced) by a new set of posthuman
people. The transhumanist ideal will be maximally realized only if the benefits
of technologies are widely shared and if they are made available as soon as possible,
preferably within our lifetime.

5. Derivative values

From
these specific requirements flow a number of derivative transhumanist values that
translate the transhumanist vision into practice. (Some of these values may also
have independent justifications, and transhumanism does not imply that that the
list of values provided below is exhaustive.)

To
start with, transhumanists typically place emphasis on individual freedom and
individual choice in the area of enhancement technologies. Humans differ widely
in their conceptions of what their own perfection or improvement would consist
in. Some want to develop in one direction, others in different directions, and
some prefer to stay the way they are. It would neither be morally unacceptable
for anybody to impose a single standard to which we would all have to conform.
People should have the right to choose which enhancement technologies, if any,
they want to use. In cases where individual choices impact substantially on other
people, this general principle may need to be restricted, but the mere fact that
somebody may be disgusted or morally affronted by somebody else’s using technology
to modify herself would not normally a legitimate ground for coercive interference.
Furthermore, the poor track record of centrally planned efforts to create better
people (e.g. the eugenics movement and Soviet totalitarianism) shows that we need
to be wary of collective decision-making in the field of human modification.

Another
transhumanist priority is to put ourselves in a better position to make wise choices
about where we are going. We will need all the wisdom we can get when negotiating
the posthuman transition. Transhumanists place a high value on improvements in
our individual and collective powers of understanding and in our ability to implement
responsible decisions. Collectively, we might get smarter and more informed through
such means as scientific research, public debate and open discussion of the future,
information markets[8], collaborative information filtering[9]. On an individual level, we can
benefit from education, critical thinking, open-mindedness, study techniques,
information technology, and perhaps memory- or attention-enhancing drugs and other
cognitive enhancement technologies. Our ability to implement responsible decisions
can be improved by expanding the rule of law and democracy on the international
plane. Additionally, artificial intelligence, especially if and when it reaches
human-equivalence or greater, could give an enormous boost to the quest for knowledge
and wisdom.

Given the
limitations of our current wisdom, a certain epistemic tentativeness is appropriate,
along with a readiness to continually reassess our assumptions as more information
becomes available. We cannot take for granted that our old habits and beliefs
will prove adequate in navigating our new circumstances.

Global
security can be improved by promoting international peace and cooperation, and
by strongly counteracting the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Improvements
in surveillance technology may make it easier to detect illicit weapons programs.
Other security measures might also be appropriate to counteract various existential
risks. More studies on such risks would help us get a better understanding of
the long-term threats to human flourishing and of what can be done to reduce them.

Since
technological development is necessary to realize the transhumanist vision, entrepreneurship,
science, and the engineering spirit are to be promoted. More generally, transhumanists
favor a pragmatic attitude and a constructive, problem-solving approach to challenges,
preferring methods that experience tells us give good results. They think it better
to take the initiative to “do something about it” rather than sit around complaining.
This is one sense in which transhumanism is optimistic. (It is not optimistic
in the sense of advocating an inflated belief in the probability of success or
in the Panglossian sense of inventing excuses for the shortcomings of the status
quo.)

Transhumanism advocates
the well-being of all sentience, whether in artificial intellects, humans, and
non-human animals (including extraterrestrial species, if there are any). Racism,
sexism, speciesism, belligerent nationalism and religious intolerance are unacceptable.
In addition to the usual grounds for deeming such practices objectionable, there
is also a specifically transhumanist motivation for this. In order to prepare
for a time when the human species may start branching out in various directions,
we need to start now to strongly encourage the development of moral sentiments
that are broad enough encompass within the sphere of moral concern sentiences
that are constituted differently from ourselves.

Finally,
transhumanism stresses the moral urgency of saving lives, or, more precisely,
of preventing involuntary deaths among people whose lives are worth living. In
the developed world, aging is currently the number one killer. Aging is also biggest
cause of illness, disability and dementia. (Even if all heart disease and cancer
could be cured, life expectancy would increase by merely six to seven years.)
Anti-aging medicine is therefore a key transhumanist priority. The goal, of course,
is to radically extent people’s active health-spans, not to add a few extra years
on a ventilator at the end of life.

Since
we are still far from being able to halt or reverse aging, cryonic suspension
of the dead should be made available as an option for those who desire it. It
is possible that future technologies will make it possible to reanimate people
who have cryonically suspended.[10] While cryonics might be a long shot, it definitely
carries better odds than cremation or burial.

The table below summarizes
the transhumanist values that we have discussed.

TABLE
OF TRANSHMANIST VALUES

Core
Value

Having the opportunity to explore the transhuman and posthuman realms

Basic
Conditions

Global
security

Technological
progress

Wide
access

Derivative
Values

Nothing wrong about “tampering with nature”; the idea of hubris
rejected

Individual choice in use of enhancement technologies; morphological
freedom

Peace, international cooperation, anti-proliferation of WMDs

Improving understanding (encouraging research and public
debate; critical thinking; open-mindedness, scientific inquiry; open
discussion of the future)